The United States government’s plan to allocate $20 million to electric shock gloves for immigration agents sparked rejection from Democratic congressmen and immigrant advocates, who called for cutting funding for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE).
“Arming poorly trained agents with electric shock gloves to inflict pain on our neighbors is disgusting and barbaric,” Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), said in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Monday a contract worth up to $20 million to buy CTG-5 gloves, which have electrodes on the palm and emit electrical pulses upon contact with the skin to cause pain.
The department described them as a “de-escalation device” and defended that ICE continually evaluates the equipment its agents need.
Matos described ICE as “an uncontrolled agency with an opaque fund of 80 billion dollars” and demanded that Congress put an end to the “blank check” to the agency.
For her part, Congresswoman Delia Ramírez, Democrat of Illinois, wrote on the social network X that “under no circumstances” can the Department of Homeland Security be trusted with electric shock gloves.
Ramírez called for passing his ‘Melt ICE Act’ bill, which would cut the department’s funding to detain immigrants.
Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost, Democrat of Florida, criticized on the same network the taxpayer’s spending of $20 million on gloves for “masked and lawless thugs.”
The National Day Labor Organization Network (NDLON) accused Donald Trump’s Administration of having “the ability to discreetly torture people.” «There is no fix for this; “The only solution is abolition,” its director, Jorge Torres, declared in a note.
ICE draws criticism for its detention operations. The controversy focused in recent months on the fatal shootings of Mexican Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Colombian Johan Durán after traffic stops in Texas and Maine, respectively.
In January, the death of two American citizens during immigration operations in Minneapolis sparked a wave of protests against the federal agency.
